What the heck is a good idea?
I was reviewing workshop materials for a client recently and came across a group activity embedded in the workshop that bothered me.
Part 1: Assignment
Generate as many good ideas as you can — one idea per post-it… Be as specific as possible!Part 2: Assignment
Share the best two ideas your group came up with.
Seemingly innocuous upon first read, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I felt enormous umbrage at two words: good and best. These words are lazy modifiers and detrimental to the ideation process.
Good is Bad
Let’s start with ‘good’. Good is an insufficient directive for ideation. It’s a completely subjective word and unhelpful to those ideating because it’s unclear and unspecific. The activity asks people to generate ‘good ideas’ without defining ‘good ideas’ or providing a framework and criteria by which to evaluate ideas that might be ‘good’. ‘Good’ could be from the perspective of the person coming up with the idea or the person asking for the ideas or the stakeholders affected by the ideas or some combination of these. In the exercise above it is vague and ambiguous.
‘Good’ becomes pernicious when each person ideating uses it consciously or subconsciously as an internal filter. With a ‘good’ filter, instead of letting ideas flow freely onto the post-its, people pause, subjectively assign value to their ideas, and selectively share them. This can be problematic. One person’s ‘bad’ idea might be an epiphanic idea for someone else.
Effectively designed ideation exercises eliminate unintentional ambiguity so people can brainstorm freely and without constraint. If you need constraints to narrow the focus of ideation, use clear, descriptive adjectives to guide brainstormers.
To Start, Quantity Over Quality
If you’re not going to define ‘good’, it’s better to drop the word entirely. Instead, strive for quantity first. Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit shares an exercise in which she asks her students to come up with sixty ideas for a stool. She describes three phases of ideation her students go through while trying to hit the quota:
The closer they get to the sixtieth idea, the more imaginative they become — because they have been forced to stretch their thinking. They have been forced to stretch their thinking. It’s the same arc every time: the first third of the ideas are obvious; the second third are more interesting; the final third show flair, insight, curiosity, even complexity, as later thinking builds on earlier thinking… I’m not knocking first ideas. They’re often the best. But they’re rarely the most radical stretch, and that’s the purpose of this exercise… We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
By giving people a quantity goal rather than an ill-defined quality goal, she enables her students to come up with more creative ideas. You can also use competition to drive quantity. If you have 10 or more more people ideating, break into groups and challenge each group to come up with more ideas than the others.
Early on in the ideation process, removing constraints and restrictions is productive — it’s also more fun. When the ideation process is wide and divergent, participants generate more ideas. Having more ideas increases the likelihood you will discover a breakthrough idea
Best is Worst
The word ‘best’ provides similar challenges as the word ‘good’. Using it as the mechanism to select ideas to share with the broader group is problematic. Though ideating should be unhindered and unencumbered, when evaluating ideas, it’s important to ground yourself and your group in a common understanding of what the ideas are trying to accomplish and how you should approach judging them.
Without a clear framework, participants will inevitably use inconsistent criteria to evaluate the worth of an idea. And, you create an environment where subjectively valued ideas may offend or discourage some of those ideating. If I, as a person, brainstorm an idea I think is ‘best’ but the group disagrees, I feel like I either don’t understand what ‘best’ means or feel like my ideas aren’t the ‘best’. If another adjective like ‘actionable’ is used to describe the ideas my group is trying to generate, it’s easier to understand if my idea isn’t selected — it might be the ‘best’ idea in my mind but if we’re looking for actionable, it’s more clear that my idea might not fit the ask of the moment.
Ideas can be valuable without being a lot of other adjectives. If you opt for ‘best’ ideas without contextualizing what ‘best’ means or how it should be interpreted, you risk alienating some of your brainstormers by subjectively placing higher value on other ideas at the expense of theirs.
Be Specific
When you ask a group to downselect ideas, do so in a way that is more specific and directive and less alienating. Instead of asking for the best ideas, consider asking for ideas that:
- Will resonate most with the other groups
- Are aligned with our values
- Will be controversial
- Feasible to implement in the next 30 days
- Good opportunities for long-term investment
If possible, provide multiple criteria with different weighting to brainstormers as a more robust way for them to evaluate and prioritize ideas. If you have the time in your sessions, you can also define the criteria that comprise a ‘best’ idea as a group. Creating together will allow your people to be better judges. If you want to be more thorough, give different criteria to different groups. See what they come back with and have a discussion on which criteria should be weighted more heavily.
A Better Assignment
Don’t self-sabotage yourself with ‘good’ and ‘best’. Be thoughtful, descriptive, and intentional. If I could offer edits to the original assignment:
Part 1: Assignment
As a group, working first as individuals, generate as many ideas as you can. Try and generate more ideas than the other groups.Each sticky note should have one idea. Be as specific as possible.
Part 2: Assignment
As a group, identify two ideas that align with our values and are feasible to implement in the next 30 days.
Words are powerful facilitation tools. Wield them well.
Curiously Yours — Seb
Sources and Suggested Reading:
- Tharp, T., & Reiter, M. (2006). The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
